Technically adept people would search using ordered keywords and phrases, which would have excellent results with Google 2006:
Dario Turkey NBA "never coming over"
But regular people agonized over this because to them a search was
What were some of the memes about Dario staying in turkey
Google put immense effort into calibrating search for regular people instead of engineers.
Maybe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note
>In 1968, Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M in the United States, attempted to develop a super-strong adhesive. [...]
>Post-its were launched across the United States in 1980.[20][21] The following year, they were launched in Canada and Europe.[22] Post-it Notes as we know them were patented by Fry in 1993 as a "repositionable pressure-sensitive adhesive sheet material".[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylate
The first thorough research went into them when looking for new clear plastics, and this route of making them was ruled out because it would rather stick to everything than ease the production of objects with nice optical properties. The story goes, it was so annoying to work with that it was initially shelved, and only years after being considered again and ruled out again for a different project, the utility of its reliable and fast bonding was fully appreciated.
"No true normie would be dissatisfied with this unhelpful response, really it's exactly what a true normie wants"
I agree that plain language queries is what people wanted. We've been seeing Google shift in that direction for well over a decade. And of course people are looking towards search engines for answers. There may be different expectations for where those answers are coming from, and there are cases where people are simply trying to source information, but those differences are likely just noise as far as Google is concerned.
I don't agree with people expecting advice or reassurance from a search engine. There will be some people who do that. It may even be a sizeable number of people. But using this article as an example that a majority of people want such a thing is silly.
I mean, look at the query. To the author, it was an attempt to source information. Yet the author also realised that the reader would need context to understand why Google's response was weird in their mind. What they failed to do was give context to Google, so the LLM interpreted it as asking for social advice.
New technology requires new approaches. It's as simple as that.
But anthropomorphic interfaces have been around for a while, from Clippy to the Windows 10+ installers that refer to the royal We during setup.
As in, it probably has 90% of the market share. Possibly even 99%, going by number of prompts made.
AI labs have long since realized that the only real path to direct profitability is coding, and in this, Google have indeed fallen behind.
You can, of course, argue that none of this matters as long as the whole is making a profit, but I think the distinction is important.
and something like 3% of LLM userbase pays to get access to the higher tier models with actual useful thinking
Too many users still reject this for it to not be a scam. The highest acceptance is from boomers and the delusional. Neither group gives a shit if AI actually works because they don't have work to do.